ECONOMY

Growing Pretoria

If the national economy is lethargic, much of the Pretoria region does not appear to be reflecting this, and continues to grow at an uninhibited pace across a number of high-growth nodes.

This was pointed out recently by Retha Schutte, Pam Golding Properties’ regional executive, Pretoria. “The Pretoria region is benefitting from considerable investment by local government in infrastructure development such as roads, Gautrain and the Bus Rapid Transit system, as well as from the private sector which continues to invest in commercial, retail and residential developments,” she observed.

According to Schutte, the rapid development of the Tshwane municipal area augers well for the future of the highly dynamic city, as well as for the residential property market, which has continued to remain stimulated by this growth and buoyant in a number of residential property ‘hotspot’ suburbs and centres.

According to the recently released The Study, the Pam Golding Property (PGP) group’s quarterly research report, which incorporates the Pam Golding Residential Property Index, house price inflation within South Africa as a whole had slowed to 5.8 percent in 2015. Regions such as Pretoria and Centurion have bucked this trend, however, and have shown much higher residential property price inflation.

“We are seeing considerable growth in nodes such as Menlyn and now Loftus, as well as the redevelopment of more established suburbs such as Hatfield and Menlo Park,” says Schutte.

“This alongside the redevelopment of the so-called “Old East”, for example in Brooklyn, where developers are demolishing homes in order to erect new apartment buildings. An exciting R44 billion mixed-use project for the Hazeldean area was also recently approved by the Tshwane metropolitan district.”